While surfing the Internet, I came across the site Adventures from the Bedrooms of African Women, a pan-African blog of intimate and sexual stories, written mainly by women. I interviewed one of its co-founders, Malaka Grant, a Ghanaian writer based in South Africa, who told me about the difficulty of fully experiencing pleasure, freely exploring one’s sexuality and writing on the subject without hiding.
She later invited me to participate in a seminar in the presence of African women who write on the subject, some of them with their names and faces revealed. They break the taboos of their society, revisit colonial history, the repressive laws and morals introduced by colonization (on homosexuality for example), explore an older heritage to free themselves from prohibitions and propose another relationship with the body. .
I listened to them, I read them, I thought of all those I had listened to tell me about the richness of their sexual exploration and asked myself: is a sexual revolution underway on the African continent? “Without a doubt,” Malaka Grant replied, without hesitation. African women (re)discover their strength of spirit, their self-esteem and the diversity of their beauty. The sexual revolution occurs first in our consciousness and takes shape in our bedrooms and wherever we choose to make love, freely. »
The shift began in the 1970s, believes the Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe, who published an article in May 2020, in the online journal Trou noir, in which he deplores the fact that this “silent” revolution is so little documented while it “radically transformed – and for good – the way many Africans imagine their relationship to desire, the body, sex and pleasure.”
Escaping the grip of pornography
In Africa as elsewhere, “young people are in contact with the pleasures of the city, cafes, restaurants, nightclubs; new ways of being in the world are developing,” underlines Francis Sarr, co-author of an article on sexuality in Senegal published in 2022 by Karthala. “These changes, more visible in the city, penetrate the hearts of everyone even in the countryside, where young people are also very exposed to television and social networks,” adds Emmanuel Cohen, co-author of the article. Old distinctions are blurring, impacted by new norms.
What these researchers analyze in West Africa can help understand the nature of the upheavals underway on the continent, which is experiencing an unprecedented opening to the world. To describe these changes on the scale of Africa without generalizing the trends, I wanted to give voice to those who want to tell their stories, convinced that free and intimate speech must be able to exist on this subject – and escape the influence of pornography as the only place of access to sexuality.
In this space, everyone will be able to talk about their trajectory to affirm their desires, share their commitments, their thoughts, their sufferings too. Hoping that these stories allow those who experience these questions, isolated, to find their way.
